The startup trap that kept this longevity app founder stuck

Brent Franson spent four years building a mental-health app that users liked, but that didn’t ultimately work as a business.

The product wasn’t an obvious flop.

It had enough promise, he said, to make further rounds of changes seem worthwhile — the trap of something that seemed “pretty good,” though ultimately isn’t viable. “Mediocrity is so dangerous,” Franson said.

In late 2024, seeing a need for a fresh start, he shut down the app, called Most Days, and discarded the codebase that his team had spent years building.

The San Francisco-based staff then shifted their attention to building a consumer-health product called Death Clock, which Franson, 44, described as an “AI private doctor.” Users enter health information — ranging from cholesterol levels to diet and sleep habits — and the platform uses longevity research to estimate the age at which they might die and suggest changes that could help them live longer.

The experience reshaped how the longtime early-stage entrepreneur, who in 2019 sold a prior software company he ran to WeWork, thinks about startups.

Here are three lessons Franson has learned: Most Days had users, though the company could not acquire them cheaply enough to build a sound business, he said.

The scary part of pivoting, Franson said, is not when a business is clearly failing or obviously taking off.

It is when a product has users who like it and just enough promise to make another round of changes seem worthwhile. “You can convince yourself to keep iterating on it,” he said.

Franson, who is CEO of Death Clock, calls that danger “slow failure”: a business that lingers because its leaders keep rationalizing why it might soon work.

One test, he said, is whether founders are working through concrete problems with conviction or trying to talk themselves into continuing.

For Franson, the response wasn’t to rebrand Most Days or look for another half-measure like a savvy hire.

He said the hardest decision was abandoning a company the team had spent years building and still believed served an important mental-health need.

Yet, Franson said, the team concluded that they needed to make a clean break and a full bet on Death Clock.

The team carried no code from Most Days over to their new venture, Franson said.

The decision also meant embracing a name he initially saw as a potentially terrible mistake.

The team had considered calling the product “More Years,” Franson said, before deciding to keep the more provocative working name they had been using internally.

Franson said the failure of Most Days taught him that product quality alone wouldn’t cut it.

A consumer company also needed a way to get attention without spending heavily to buy it, he said.

When Franson went to Most Days’ investors about the shift, he said they faced a choice: Take back a fraction of their investment or support the Death Clock idea.

Their reactions to the name were sharply divided, Franson said. “People either loved the name Death Clock, or they hated it, but they didn’t forget it,” he said.

Franson came to see the name as a distribution strategy in a crowded consumer-health market, where companies with ample funding can spend heavily to acquire customers.

Death Clock’s name comes with risks, he said, including whether the attention-grabbing approach will keep people from taking it seriously as a consumer-health product.

The episode reinforced an idea that Franson now cites about building startups: First-time founders focus on product; second-time founders focus on distribution.

While the company’s name is provocative, Franson said the company remains restrained about the health interventions it recommends.

Death Clock doesn’t sell peptides, he said, because the company’s clinical advisors don’t believe the science supports their use.

It’s a choice that means forgoing potential revenue, Franson said.

The lesson he took from Most Days was not that founders should never persist, but that they should recognize when it has become a form of rationalization. “It’s hard to tell the difference, a lot of times, between slow success and slow failure,” he said.